Zenoss is more than happy to announce our sponsorship of Software Freedom Day 2008! Zenoss is committed to supporting the open source community and to helping spread the adoption of open source software. We see first hand the positive impact our software has on businesses, government, and educational institutions around the world, and want to participate in the growth and evangelism of open source software like ours. As a sponsor of Software Freedom Day 2008 we hope to further expose software users and developers to the benefits of transparent, collaborative software development.

Zenoss Austin will be participating in local Software Freedom Day events sponsored by the Austin Linux Users Group and the Austin Ubuntu Team, please come out and join the fun! For more details: http://austinlug.org/node/294

Tags: austin, linux, software freedom day, ubuntu, user groups, Zenoss

This week the winners of the SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards were announced at OSCON. I wanted to thank everyone who voted for us. We were nominated in three categories which was quite a feat. I think this is a testament to the enthusiasm of our users in a relatively small project  (when compared to the likes of Drupal, Linux and OpenOffice.org.

Information Week’s Sergar Yegulaip has coverage of the awards ceremony and a great quote from SourceForge’s Community Manager Ross Turk who has been extremely helpful in making the Zenoss Core project a success.

“One thing I was fairly certain of, since this had happened to me, was that some of Ross’ own favorite projects probably didn’t win anything. In my case, it was 7-Zip and PortableApps, but I was curious what Ross’ favorites were.

“We’d have to be Switzerland to not take sides, but if that wasn’t the case, I wanted Zenoss to win something. And I can say that because I myself have no control over the project!”

Here’s the list of the winners in the categories we were nominated in. I think given that the two projects that edged us out have millions of users and we have thousands makes it tough for us to win (though as fast as people are adopting Zenoss we are hopeful for the future). We would like to offer our congratulations to the following projects.

• Best Project for the Enterprise »OpenOffice.org
  http://www.openoffice.org

• Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition »phpMyAdmin
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin

• Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins »phpMyAdmin
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin

Thanks again to everyone that voted for Zenoss, and for your continuing support.

Tags: awards, community choice, Open Source, SourceForge

Zenny the Zebra and the Future of IT Mangagement - We tried to recruit a new contributor but we are going to wait until he gets to junor high before we expect his first Zenpack. For those of you who are old enough feel free to submit yours.

Vote for your favourite monitoring tool - Hopefully it’s Zenoss, if not it’s Matt’s fault

Matt Ray Co-hosts the IT Management Guys Podcast - Matt helped co-host the IT management Podcast last week despite having a cold he did a good job.

Tech Teapot: Open Source Management Comparison - Jack is doing a comparison of open source management solutions.

Zenoss: a great system monitoring program which tries to do everything right - Free Sooftware Magazine published an eBook on Zenoss this week, good feedback from a hobbyist user.

In case you missed the press release, we announced our Gold Sponsorship of the Twisted Software Foundation. We think this is important because as CTO Erik Dahl said:

“At Zenoss our software lives and breathes Twisted, and as a commercial open source company we feel it’s important to give back to the projects we use.”

It also helps when they share our vision for open source in the enterprise and provide the tools to make it happen.

“As early as two years ago, many people still questioned the use of open source software in the enterprise,” said Glyph Lefkowitz, founder of Twisted. “Forward-thinking companies like Zenoss are proving that through collaboration and community involvement open source software is not only ready for, but can excel in, an enterprise environment. The Twisted project enables companies like Zenoss to benefit from the collective input of a highly technical and savvy community.”

Zenoss is grateful for the support of our partners, community and customers and we’re always eager to help those who help us. Thanks again for your support.

Our own Simon Jakesch was a guest on the Hak5 podcast. Simon demonstrated Zenoss showing how to discover devices and monitor networks. This is one of the better primers we have on what Zenoss does and how it works complete with screencasts.

This week CBROnline published a story,”Big win for open source in IT management” about UTStarcom’s use of Zenoss. My favorite parts of the story are:

“Notch it up as a victory for open source over enterprise software. Zenoss, a provider of open source IT management software, has beaten off competition from four leading commercial software providers to land a deal at global technology firm UTStarcom.”

and this:

“We found solutions from the large vendors were pricey with recurring annual costs and consultancy fees, and lacked the flexibility along with ease of customization they needed,” said Ari Bose, CIO of UTStarcom.
Please visit CBROnline for the whole story and if you like it the story is posted on Digg, so if you are so inclined please:

Matt Asay asks Zenoss CEO, Bill Karpovich about the lessons he has learned while running an open source business on the CNET Open Road blog. it’s a good read and of course a nice highlight of Zenoss.

Zenossians,

As we approach the lazy days of summer, the Zenoss development team has been anything but lazy. Zenoss 2.0 was released this month to a hugely positive reception. We are very proud of our progress and want to thank you for all your encouragement and feedback.

Zenoss Core 2.0 Now Available

Zenoss Core 2.0 was released on June 11th. The new version of Zenoss Core is the first commercial open source IT management solution to include a configuration management database (CMDB), and adds several other features that should help simplify management tasks.

Configuration Management Enhancements

• Better mixing of auto-discovery and manually-populated information
• Ability to specify required configuration elements through “Locking”

User Interface Enhancements

• Updated AJAX GUI streamlines information access
• Expanded web-based administration makes Zenoss Core easier to use and configure through the GUI

Platform Enhancements to Address the Needs of Large Deployments

• Collectors can be securely deployed in a distributed model
• Improved Performance and scalability of collection tier

Native Windows Collection (WMI) from a Linux Host

• Cross-platform collection from a single linux server
• Simplifies deployment (no need for windows proxy)

Packaging System for Rules & Extensions (”ZenPacks”)

• Framework for encapsulating and distributing rules & extensions for Zenoss Core

Zenoss Enterprise 2.0 - Coming Soon!

We are just about to launch updates to Zenoss Enterprise. In addition to world class support services and IP assurance, the next version of our commercial offering includes several features that may save you time and provide deeper visibility, including:

• Synthetic Transactions for Web Apps
• Multi-Instance Dashboard
• Certified Application Monitors for MS Exchange & SQLServer
• Direct collection of Windows Performance Counters
• Hardware Appliance

With this launch approaching quickly we are offering a 20% reduction in the annual subscription fees and the ability to lock in your subscription rate for Enterprise Edition today. Act now and you will get the high quality, high value Zenoss subscription services with an even lower cost of ownership!! This offer ends June 30th so contact us immediately to take advantage of this pre-release offer for Zenoss Enterprise Edition.

Get Training on Zenoss Products

Zenoss Administrator Training Course- Annapolis , MD - July 24-25, 2007

Learn Zenoss from the experts by attending this 2-day, hands-on training course. Zenoss’ experienced trainers deliver the knowledge necessary to successfully deploy and maintain your Zenoss instance. Training is held at the Zenoss, Inc. headquarters in Annapolis, Maryland. For more information, email training@zenoss.com or view our product offering.

Additional Platform Support

We would love to extend support for additional platforms and Linux distributions. Currently, we have a very ambitious German team (Stefano, Fabio, and Bernd) working to make Zenoss available on Debian Linux. If you have interest in helping port Zenoss to another operating system we will be glad to help you make Zenoss more readily available to users of other operating systems. Let us know if you are interested in porting Zenoss to Gentoo Linux, OpenSolaris, BSD or another operating system.

Zenoss in the News

Zenoss received numerous news mentions and blog mentions this month, here are some of the highlights:

News Articles

• NetworkWorld - Zenoss boosts open source management software
• eWeek - Zenoss Grows with Open Source Management
• Infoworld - Zenoss : Bringing open source to enteprise management
• Information Week - High Five: Bill Karpovich, CEO of Zenoss

Blog Mentions

• bzed.de - hacking at debconf
• OpenXtra Blog - “New wave” Windows support
• ZDNet (Dana Blankenhorn) - is Zenoss ambition justified?
• Latin Tech Talk - Sistemas de Monitoreo de redes
• Computer Business Review Online (Matt Aslett) - Zenoss Updates Open Source Management Offering

We Want You… To Join the Zenoss Team!

Zenoss is hiring sharp technical staff to serve our rapidly-growing list of clients. If you think you are interested please visit our careers page . Currently we have the following opening:

Consulting Technical Engineer – You will be on the front lines helping to provide installation and technical support to our commercial clients. The ideal candidates will have experience in the implementation of enterprise network monitoring systems. This position will require approximately 40% travel to various client locations. Apply Today .

Thanks for your interest and support. Please keep telling us what you think we want to make managing your IT infrastructure less hassle and more fun!
Best Regards,
The Zenoss Team

Barry Nance at NetworkWorld has done an evaluation of three commercial open source management platforms and has named Zenoss the winner in a NetworkWorld ClearChoice Review.

 ”Zenoss Core’s faultless and quick discovery of all our devices, servers, clients, operating systems, applications and running processes was a delight to behold.

On an ongoing basis and on a schedule we set, its discovery process automatically detected and logged changes to our network, including server configuration changes – a feature that even most commercial products lack.”

Here’s a nice chart of the final results.

This week we are getting ready to release Zenoss Core 2.0. We are very excited about this huge milestone in the development of the Zenoss. Paula Musich of eWeek wrote a nice article about the launch.
“The open-source tool moves beyond the more cumbersome, first-generation “death by configuration file” interaction by providing a full Web-browser-based user interface, making it easier for more Windows-oriented administrators to use, Karpovich said. The UI is based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML).

“For customers scaling up their implementations to manage a larger number of devices, Zenoss has made the tool more scalable by adding new distributed data collectors. The aim is to scale to manage thousands of devices across LAN and WAN connections by distributing SNMP and Windows Management Interface event collection in strategic locations in an enterprise network. That reduces the amount of bandwidth taken up by transmitting management data and enabling that data to be sent via secured connections.”